UNESCO's Encouragement to Go Back to Roots
After UNESCO labeled the whirling dervish tradition an intangible cultural tradition in 2008, it went from being strictly religious, to used by the Culture and Tourism Committee as a tourist trap, to something in between. The UNESCO site talks about how, after the bans of 1925, the formerly extensive 1,001 day training sessions for dancers were reduced to secret meetings focused on music and songs. Essentially, the religious intensity of the training was replaced with musicality and dance technique education.
Moreover, UNESCO asserts that the sema ceremonies are not performed for the former Turkish audiences, but rather for tourists, in shorter segments, and for more commercial reasons.
We are coming full circle to the reason behind having the Mevlevi Museum in the first place; we can see that indeed there is a natural foreign interest in the beautiful Turkish cultural history. Yet, this “outsider” functional lieu de mémoire has almost overridden Turkish interest in its own history in this context. This can most definitely be attributed to the lucrative aspect of tourists coming into see the dance and stimulating the Turkish economy. Yet, it is confounded by the typical explanation for a lieu de mémoire commemorating a certain culture - according to Nora, intentional lieux de mémoire are efforts for one culture on its own behalf, a sort of self-obsession and obsessive tendency.
Sources:
http://www.unesco.org/culture/ich/en/RL/mevlevi-sema-ceremony-00100